tl;dr: A sequel season that focuses less on battles of wits and more on long term plot and character development, for better or worse.
The third season of Classroom of the Elite follows follows Ayanokouji through to the end of his first year at Tokyo Metropolitan Advanced Nurturing High School. In the same way that Ryuen was the focus of the second season, this season is focused on Sakayanagi, the leader of Class A. However, she’s very different from Ryuen in that she’s someone that has history with Ayanokouji and is fully aware of what he is capable of, and wants to challenge him head on without any pretenses. That only occurs near the end of the season though, so the majority of this season is her simply messing around with Ayanokouji’s class without trying all that hard.
This season continues down the direction that the second season started going down in that the focus on games and tricks is pretty much gone completely. There’s still strategies and planning involved, but they’re more just something happening on the side rather than the core of each arc. There aren’t really any epic twists where Ayanokouji turns things around and subverts expectations or anything like that. Thus, there simply isn’t as much room for Ayanokouji to shine. Furthermore, while Ayanokouji is still manipulative, his machinations are much more on the nice side as compared to previous seasons. For example, there’s nothing on the level of what he pulled when trying to take control of Karuizawa. As such, Ayanokouji has a much softer and less edgy presence as compared to previous seasons. To be frank, I’m not much a fan of that.
The focus of this season is Ayanokouji initiated character development. The majority of what Ayanokouji does this season is simply listen to people’s backgrounds and then respond to them. Ichinose and Hirata’s background comes into focus and they overcome their traumas. Meanwhile, Ryuen manages to pick himself up and come back better than ever. And Karuizawa continues along the path of increasingly becoming Ayanokouji’s loyal pawn. Though the biggest highlight was probably Horikita growing out of her brother’s shadow. Most of the character growth wasn’t all that deep, but it all being intermingled and happening in parallel with everything else going on worked well.
In addition to that, there was also a lot of setup regarding the general state of the academy and where things are going to go from here. I feel that the author, Kinugasa Shougo’s, bad habits are starting to shine through in this regard. In his other works, it feels that a lot of the time he had no idea where he’s going with his stories. He’s great at writing things in the moment and is a master at building intrigue through foreshadowing, but a lot of this build up and foreshadowing goes absolutely nowhere. This has begun to manifest this season. A lot of what was set up in previous seasons has been thrown away in favor of new stuff. And the new stuff is really cool as well. But I’m not sure how much I can trust that this new stuff won’t be thrown away either.
The art and animation are pretty similar to the previous season so there’s not really anything much more to say about them. The OP and EDs are decent enough in terms of the song and visuals. The soundtrack was more intense than previous seasons and I felt that worked better.